A intense discussion lately went viral across online platforms, after a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.